


green and pleasant land

by a_verysmallviolet



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Dismemberment, Gen, Human Sacrifice, Implied Cannibalism, cultural barrier, plowing, set before the series, two instances of brief non-consensual touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 21:13:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13039518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_verysmallviolet/pseuds/a_verysmallviolet
Summary: Spring between the Londons is more similar and more different than Kell could have guessed.





	green and pleasant land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muffinworry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muffinworry/gifts).



> The idea for this fic came from muffinworry. Two of the lines here are hers; I use them with her permission, and note the specific lines at the end.

The first thing Kell notices is the quiet.

By itself, that’s nothing unusual. He’s long known that White London in daytime is a still and watchful city. But it’s the quality of the quiet that arrests him today. The creaking of a well, the subdued murmur of the crowd while a shy breeze blows, someone humming on a second story somewhere – these are the signs of a quiet born from peace, not fear.

The second thing he notices is how few magicians there are. The people in the market square are still faded, but they are faded the way Holland is – ashen and shadowy, instead of a sorcerer’s stark white coloring.

As he weaves through the crowd, Kell is half puzzling over the magicians’ absence, half keeping a wary eye out for ambushes and mundane danger – so, naturally, he doesn’t see the barkeep of the Scorched Bone at all until the man shouts.

He turns, startled. His hand closes automatically around his knife. The barkeep – Orus – is leaving a stall hung with dried herbs and clicking flasks, a half-full basket over his arm. His face is still unlined, but his hair is streaked with gray, and his expression as grim as a soldier’s with decades of experience.

“You’re for the pale twins, Master Redhead?” he says as he comes to a stop beside Kell. “You won’t find them in the fortress – they’re in the fields today. It’s plowing season.”

“ _Both_ of them?” Kell asks, surprised. The Danes have been in power now for four years. In all that time, he’s never once known them to leave the city at the same time. Too risky – no wolf likes leaving its kill unguarded, lest the carrion birds steal it.

Orus only shrugs. “It’s plowing season,” he repeats. “No one will wage war this month. If anyone interrupts the plowing, we all starve. No one need fear blood while this lasts.”

Kell nods slowly as he takes this in, and then asks for directions. 

Within minutes, he's turned his back on the Sijlt and moved inland, towards the city’s western edge. He’s open to the possibility of ambush, of course – he knows better than to put anything beyond White. But it’s daylight, and there are easier ways to cut an _Antari’s_ throat than this. The risk is smaller than it would be on other visits. Besides, Kell has to admit that he’s curious. He’s never been outside this London before.

Once he gets past the city walls and the trees scattered around it, the cautious breeze gains strength: shaking his hair, making the ends of his coat fly. Kell turns up his coat collar and hunches his shoulders. It’s uncomfortable, but he can bear it, and getting outside the city actually lifts his spirits. There’s still a metallic tang to the air, but underneath are the smells of damp earth and tentative greenery. It’s not spring, but it’s as close as this London will ever get.

When he reaches the fields, he’s surprised to find there are only a few scattered farmers out today. From Orus’s tone and his own experience, he’d been expecting something like Red’s huge plowing parties. It really _is_ like a party, in more ways than one. There are always festivals and feasts on the first plow day, and the Mareshes often ride down to visit, tossing coins and petals to the farmers. Later in the season, when the weather is good, Kell’s frequently joined them in their pavilions to watch the farmers at work. Rhy loves those sorts of things; in recent years, when he’s started taking a more active role in event planning, there have even been poets to compose works about it on the spot, and billowing curtains scented in rosewater to mask the farming smells. Kell personally thinks that being perched on a hill, as the scarlet pavilions always are, takes away enough of the smell, but the court had loved that idea.

Yet that scent is the same here, sharp and green and wet. Stronger and clearer, perhaps, but no more than when he’s walking alone through the fields at home. The rows in the earth are the same, scored straight and even, as are the scythes leaned incongruously against a tree. There’s even a group of revelers weaving their slow way around the edge of the furthest field, so far away that Kell can just barely make out their long poles wrapped in ribbon and the faint snatches of their singing. The familiarity is what sets him off-balance. If he closes his eyes and ignores the wind, this scene could almost be one from Red.

Enough dreaming. Kell opens his eyes again, scanning the fields for the familiar white horses with their pale riders. If he can have the choice, he’d much rather spot White London’s rulers before they see him. Caution has to live with punctuality, though; if being surprised by the Danes is bad, being late is worse. When minutes pass without Kell seeing them, he starts down the road to ask the nearest farmer.

It takes him a moment to recognize the man. He’s used to seeing this horse in white-and-silver livery, not straining under harness. The man stooped over the plow is bare to the waist, muscled and muddy as any Red farmer. He’s swearing like a farmer too, as he struggles through the muck: a low rolling litany of Maktahn that’s less angry than absentminded.

The plowman straightens at the end of the row, placing his hands at the small of his back and twisting from side to side with a grimace. A woman calls from across the next field, “ _Ös-vo rhosk tas, dösva_?”

_Are you already getting soft, brother?_

The man cups his hands around his mouth and yells back in the same language, “I’ve already done five rows to your four! Go throw your tongue to the crows!”

A bark of laughter from the woman. Kell splutters, “ _Your Majesty._ ”

Athos Dane wheels, hand dropping to his hip and the sheathed knife there. But his narrowed eyes and tense expression relax into a smile the moment he sees Kell. “Kell Maresh! You’ve soft feet, and good timing. One of those is luckier than the other.” The pale eyes glitter, cold as serpent’s scales. “What brings you here, today of all days?”

Kell’s own smile is strained. He prefers the king openly wary to smiling like this. “A letter from my queen, Your Majesty. I –“

Athos waves him off. “Wait, wait, so you don’t have to tell us twice. Hi!” he shouts across the field again. “Astrid! Holland!”

Two heads lift: one charcoal-dark, the other pale as bone. Athos waves broadly to ensure their attention, then points at Kell, evidently not wanting to risk his voice to the wind any more than necessary.

Kell waits uncomfortably as Astrid waves back, unharnesses her horse near the end of the row, and starts leading it back towards them. Holland takes a little longer to disengage from his own plow. He’d been working the furthest field, and his is the only team without a horse. The _Antari_ had been under harness himself.

The workers that remain and take over his plow are unnaturally silent. Even from this distance, Kell can make out the pale uniform and eerie unison of the soulbound palace servants. He bites back a shudder and tries not to think of how much blood, how much control, the king would need to plow and command all these souls at the same time. Besides, Astrid is close enough to see him clearly now. Showing any sign of weakness to her would be like trailing blood in the water for a shark.

The queen’s smile is already more than sharp enough as she comes to a stop beside Athos and takes Kell in. Like her brother, Astrid is barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of breeches that leaves her calves bare and streaked with mud. Kell’s cheeks heat despite himself, but no one else seems to notice, Astrid least of all.

“Flower boy, here to watch the plowing,” she drawls. She claps a hand on the horse’s flank, her wiry muscles loosening like a cat’s at rest. “Are you skipping out on the work back home? Didn’t like to get those pretty hands dirty?”

Kell hands the letter over. “My queen sends her regards,” he says. “It will be the Clear Spring festival soon, and she hopes your London rejoices in the sun’s return as our does.”

Astrid takes the letter and glances over it, before handing it to Athos. Her brother hands over a flask in turn without being asked. She takes the waterskin, pulls out the stopper with her teeth, and drinks, the translation rune at the base of her throat flexing with the motion. Athos is rubbing his own rune thoughtfully as he reads.

Kell starts as Astrid’s horse nudges him from behind, but tentatively scratches its jaw. Mercifully, the twins seem to be ignoring him. Athos is still engrossed in the letter, and Astrid is slouching again, looking across the field at the singers and Holland, who lopes silently along the field path towards them.

The horse snorts softly, whiskers tickling his neck, its mass warm and solid at his back. Its partner stamps a hoof in reply. One is in harness and the other is not, but aside from that, the pair looks almost exactly alike, from their square, blocky profiles to their half-shed winter coats, pale as their masters’ hair.

Not quite twins, though. Athos’s horse has a narrow black streak on its shoulder, one Kell could swear wasn’t there before. It doesn’t look like either mud or a natural pigmentation. His puzzled glance shifts along to Astrid’s hands, still resting casually against its flanks. For the first time, he notices her hands are bandaged.

Kell looks at her hands, then the strange marking, and then back again. In his memory, he sees again how she’d patted the horse casually just moments ago.

The letter crinkles as Athos folds it back up, and Kell’s attention snaps back towards him. It’s not a long message, Kell knows; he’d watched Emira writing it. Good wishes for the season, a brief recounting of Red’s state, courteous hopes for the Danes’ continuing good health and wise rule. Kell is never sure how the twins take that closing line, repeated without fail in each letter: whether they laugh, or ignore it, or tear it to shreds and go looking for Holland.

“So your queen hopes that we rejoice in spring as she does,” Athos remarks as he tucks the letter into his belt. “How very polite of her.”

“Very kind indeed,” Astrid echoes with a sharp grin. “I’m flattered, though, that she’d spare a prince from the plowing to send a letter to _us_.”

Kell blinks, feeling like he’s suddenly lost the thread of the conversation. “Your Majesty, I’m sorry, but…plowing?”

“You _have_ plowing, surely?”

“Of course, but…” Kell resists the urge to shrug. It doesn’t do to look too relaxed in front of the Danes – or, for that matter, too tense. Enough. He continues, “It’s not something the royal family is involved in. Not like here.” He is careful to keep his tone neutral and untinged by any hint of insult.

The twins, at any rate, look more perplexed than offended – genuinely so, not playing at it like they often do. They look at each other, then at him. “Don’t you have religion in your London?” Athos asks seriously.

“I… _religion_?”

“The plowing,” Astrid says. With a motion of her chin, she indicates the whole field. “The bleeding, the songs. Surely you have these?”

Baffled, Kell answers, “No. We plow and harvest in season, but there’s nothing of gods or religion in that.” Or anything else, really. Even the word _religion_ is English now; the Arnesian language lost its own word for that long ago.

Athos blinks. “You don’t work for anything then?”

“Of course, we still work. I don’t see –“

Athos shakes his head, irritated. He’s rubbing the rune at his throat again. “You know Maktahn, yes? Enough to translate if you must?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Kell says, although he has no idea where this is going.

“How would you say this word then? This…” He clicks his tongue impatiently and glances at Astrid. She shakes her head, mouth twitching, and steps over. With her teeth she undoes the bandage on one hand, exposing the fresh cut, and presses her hand briefly against her brother’s chest. Athos draws a circle counterclockwise in the murky blood left behind, then repeats his sentence. This time, with the rune temporarily dispelled, Kell hears it in Maktahn. “How would you say this word? _Galdra._ ”

Kell’s brow furrows as he thinks it over. The word is complex, layered in meaning. _Galdra_ means to work, to struggle, to pray, and to bleed all at once. There is no one word in any of Red’s languages to encompass it. The closest thing, in terms of both meaning and cultural significance, might be the word _spell_ itself.

The twins frown when he tells them this. At one point, he reaches the limit of his Maktahn and has to continue in English, though Athos’s face goes blank when he does. Astrid’s rune is still working, so she listens intently, and then translates into Maktahn for Athos herself. Her brother asks a few questions in a low voice, which she confirms. Kell catches a few English words mixed in with the more guttural White tongue, before the twins turn back together towards him.

“You don’t…pray… at all then?” Athos asks. He says _pray_ in English, his voice dubious, as though trying to decide if it’s poison. Kell is impressed against his will – the king must have been listening very closely to both Kell and his sister to pick out the word correctly. “You don’t pray so that you can have food, or fire for the winter, or steel to ward your bed?”

Kell spreads his hands helplessly. “No. Not in the sense you mean it.”

“Lucky world,” Astrid comments. Her eyes had gone steadily back and forth between them both, tracking the conversation. “Lucky, lucky world.”

Kell gives a strained smile. “We are lucky indeed.”

The siblings simply look at him. The exertion and the wind’s whipped their cheeks into a faint lavender blush, evidence of the blackened blood in their veins.

They look like nothing Kell has ever seen. They look like they’ve sprung from the land itself, creatures of salt and mud and white, windblown hair. Barefoot and muddy, crownless and colorless as death, there is still something terrifying about them – about how they blaze with a ruthlessly vital life.

If there’s ever been a time he was more relieved to see Holland, he can’t remember it.

The older _Antari_ slows to a walking pace as he nears their group, chest heaving from the run. Unlike the twins, he still has on a loose white shirt, but even he’s shed his tunic and shoes. Kell can see where the linen sticks to his torso with sweat, and the muddy harness marks still imprinted on his chest and shoulders.

He glances at Kell, mismatched eyes unreadable, before he dips his head to the twins. “My queen.” There’s a barely perceptible pause before he adds, “My king.”

“You just missed a very interesting conversation, Holland,” Astrid says mildly.

“Did I?” he asks. “I apologize.”

“Yes,” Athos agrees. “Kell was just telling us how grain in his world just _grows_ , all on its own _._ Imagine that.”

“I’m sure…,” Holland starts, before he has to stop and catch his breath a moment. “I’m sure it was an interesting conversation for everyone.”

Kell glances at him in concern. Holland’s still panting from his work before the plow and the long loping run across the fields. His neck and face are shining with sweat.

Athos’s expression shifts to one of mild despair. “I told you, Holland, you should be more careful with yourself. You’ll overheat.”

Clicking his tongue, he reaches over, undoes the thin drawstring holding Holland’s collar together, and opens it wide, while the _Antari_ stands expressionlessly. The newly opened V runs down to his breastbone, showing the white brand and a fresh cut running alongside. Athos trails his fingers thoughtfully over the cut before he withdraws.

“There,” he says. “Much better.”

Kell lowers his eyes, ashamed to be seeing this, ashamed to be looking away. Holland’s hands give him away; they’re curled into fists that do not loosen even when Athos steps back.

They, too, are bandaged.

He’s asking about it before he can stop himself. “Why is it you’re both plowing with wounds in your hands? I can’t see any spellwork written, and you’re usually so…careful with blood.”

The twins exchange amused looks. “The blood _is_ the spell today,” Astrid explains. “Upon the plow, into the earth. Blood from the city. Blood from the magic. Blood from the throne. All for the people. The people will live.” Her voice is half a chant, as though repeating a rhyme known from birth.

“Your hands are not bleeding, though,” he points out to Athos.

The king lifts a diffident shoulder. “In time, little one. Are you so eager to see me bleed?” Kell coughs, and the twins both laugh. Athos gestures with his chin at Holland, still smiling. “That one is, I know.”

Holland’s face does not change. His eyes are fixed on the ground. Eager to change the subject, Kell asks, “That’s why you have scythes out in springtime, then? They have a…ceremonial purpose in all this?”

“You could say so,” Astrid replies. “It is the city who will feed the most upon this grain, after all. It is the city that must tithe the most blood.”

She nods over at the pair of scythes leaning against the tree. Kell turns and takes a closer look at them. For the first time, he notices the dark stains on their blades, too thin and liquid for mud.

The singing is getting nearer.

Athos glances up at the sun, directly overhead, and shouts, his hand lifted above his head. The group of singers shouts in return, hoisting their poles high, then starts running towards their monarchs, the earth shaking beneath the dozens of pounding feet. Magicians, all of them, or else well on their way, though none as pale as the king stepping forward to meet them. For the first time, Kell notices the fabric strung between the four center poles, forming a platform.

Then he sucks in a sharp breath. Mounted on one of the weaving, ribbon-wrapped poles is a woman’s head.

Someone places a hand on his shoulder, and he jumps before he can stop himself.

“She was a dancer,” Astrid remarks. “Light feet, good legs, young blood. A strong heart. You could see it pulsing in her neck as you raised the scythe.”

Her thumb rubs Kell’s shoulder in a slow circle, as though absentmindedly. But Kell knows the Danes enough to know they’re never absentminded, never off guard. Certainly not in public, and least of all with him.

He slips out from under her hand. “In the city, I was told no one would wage war while the plowing lasts. That no blood would be shed.”

She laughs at that, cold and sharp as broken glass. “True. No one will come for our thrones while we can prove we keep the food coming. But this, here – it’s not war, it’s a part of life. You might as well ask a Londoner to stop breathing if you want us to stop killing.”

Kell looks back at the crowd, where they’ve set the rough cot at the center down on the ground before Athos. Through the forest of milling legs he can make out what it carries: a foot, half a muddy arm, the four naked quarters of a torso – he takes a deep breath in through his mouth and looks away for a moment.

Astrid lays her bloody palm on Kell’s cheek. At the icy touch, a wave of fresh horror sweeps through him, but he can’t seem to move.

“Brave little prince, aren’t you?” she asks thoughtfully. “To stay and watch. Braver than I expected. Oh, but perhaps you’d _like_ to run, hm? You’d like to run the way your world once did.” She strokes his cheek with a cold finger. Her voice drops, almost caressingly. “Flower boy from a flower world. Both as soft as roses.”

With an effort, Kell drags his gaze away: first to Holland, whose eyes meet his dispassionately, and then to Athos. The king’s stepped forward towards the mounted head, his hands cupping each side of its face.

The muscles in his back and shoulders tense. Then he wrenches the dripping head off the stake. The crowd of magicians cheers, and Kell’s stomach roils.

“Your Majesty,” he manages to say through cold lips. “I must go, soon. My queen will be anxious for your reply.”

“Already?” Astrid’s tone is musing. “Won’t you at least come along with us for the feast, my rose? I hear it’s worthwhile to learn about your neighbors.”

“No. No, thank you. Your Majesty.”

“You must stay for the oath-swearing, at least,” she says. “It would be bad luck to leave now – bad luck in all kinds of ways.”

She gives Kell a friendly smile and a last pat on the cheek. The smile visibly sharpens as she turns to Holland, who only bows wordlessly. She pats his chest affectionately, as she’d stroked the horse earlier, and then walks off to where Athos stands waiting. The pale king carries the head by its long hair in one hand and his naked knife in the other, and his smile as he looks at his sister is like the sun.

Kell can’t hear Astrid’s words over the wind, can’t see her face to read her lips, but whatever she says to him makes Athos laugh as he hands over his knife and the head swinging on its hair. The crowd, in contrast, is suddenly hushed. Even the wind has died down to a mere ghosting touch upon Kell’s hair and nape. Something about the air and the crowd has pulled tight – half with fear, half with longing.

Astrid is speaking. “Whose is the blood?”

“Mine and thine,” Athos replies at once.

“Whose is the knife?”

“Mine and thine.”

“Whose is the fear?”

“The fear is death’s, the wound is death’s.” On instinct, Kell glances over at Holland, in time to see his lips shaping the words soundlessly as the twins finish the litany together. “Ours is the blood and ours is the knife, ours is the will to see another year.”

Athos holds out his hand, and neither twin flinches as she slashes his palm open. At once she drops the knife onto the ground and takes half a step back, holding the decapitated head between her hands, eyes never leaving her brother’s face. 

Athos himself seems to have grown taller with the cut. His back is straighter, his chin held higher, his face shining with exultation like lightning against the sky. He clenches his fist over the head, dark blood welling out between his fingers, and lets the blood trickle out onto each staring eye and over the bluish lips. Last of all he moves his hand so his blood falls directly onto the earth. Red blood still dripping from the ragged neck, black blood from the king: the earth swallows both as though dying of thirst.

The twins turn to face the crowd, clasp their hands, and thrust them into the sky.

“To the fields!” Athos calls, his voice ringing like a bell. “To the earth!”

“To the water and the horizon!” Astrid cries, and her voice slashes the air like a knife. “Everyone’s hands will be red and black today.”

The roar that greets them shakes the clouds. The silhouette of their two joined hands is stark and pitiless; their ink-colored blood runs in the same rivulets down their arms. In the crowd’s transfixed faces, in the straining muscles of the twins’ backs and arms, in their pale forms etched against a colorless sky, there is nothing less than hope.

Astrid cocks her arm back and hurls the head in a high arcing throw. Another resounding cheer bursts from the crowd. Before the head has hit the ground, the cluster of magicians has started chasing after it: some singing wildly, some howling like animals, all streaked with blood. High above their heads, they wave and brandish the body parts ransacked from the cot like prizes. In the middle walk the twins, serene as stone images, still clasping their muddy, bloody hands.

It’s too much for Kell. He turns away sharply, drawing in a shuddering gasp. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath.

Holland had stepped away when he wasn’t looking, unharnessing Athos’s horse from the plow. He’s pulled his shirt collar back closed, the brand half-hidden under the folds of fabric. The horse seems unmoved by both the commotion and the smell; it only whickers softly when Holland brushes away the blood print on its flank.

Kell’s still trying to get his stomach under control. “What…” he starts; it comes out a croak. He tries again. “What…”

Too soon. He takes several deep breaths, hands on his knees, until both his stomach and his voice feel reasonably normal. Astrid’s blood is still on his face, drying into black flakes. He suddenly realizes how much it must look like her mark on him, and hastily wipes it off. Holland waits impassively, each hand holding a horse’s halter. Through the narrow slit down his shirt front, the brand flexes with his every breath.

“What next?” Kell manages to gasp at last. “Astrid spoke of a festival, a feast…surely not _that_?”

Holland’s voice is colorless. “They marked the perimeter in blood earlier, when they circled the fields. Now they will race each other for the head. They will bury that, and the other parts, throughout the fields to ensure a good harvest. Some of them will tear each other apart for that honor, and some will just do it for the blood. Those will be buried too – what’s left after the twins and the rest are done.”

The wind slaps the back of Kell’s head. It carries singing, screaming, a wet ripping sound. The smell of blood is so strong it’s almost visible, like a scarlet banner on the air.

He hates himself for asking, and asks anyway. “Can you do nothing to stop this? This is – this is so…” He shakes his head, throat and eyes burning. The other _Antari_ simply stares back at him without changing his expression.

“We do what we must,” he says. “The last king made sacrifices too.”

Kell takes a step back. “The ritual,” he finally manages. “That’s how you know the words.” His breath feels like ice in his chest. “Did you…did you also…”

“Not with scythes,” Holland says. “Not in the same way as the Danes. But I still cut my…” Something strange and haunted crosses his face. “I still cut the last king’s hand for him. We still said the same words. We still plowed this land together.”

“You _hate_ the twins, Holland,” Kell retorts, too shaken to put his words less bluntly or think of spies. “Why would you keep this sacrifice in common with them? And – of all things to share, why _this_?”

Holland’s shaking his head. “It is the throne’s duty above all to make sure the food lasts another year,” he says in his even voice. “It’s not a matter of if you’ll make sacrifices, but how often. And from there it’s a question of whether you make it because you need to or want to.”

“But – _human_ sacrifice? These are siblings, lovers… _sanct_ , Holland, these are your people!” The other _Antari_ flinches. The motion lasts less than a second, but Kell sees it, and presses on. “I understand – I know that the magic resists here, but this is no way –“

“You don’t,” Holland cuts in. His expression is wooden once more. “You don’t understand. This London is not yours, Kell. Do not try to judge us for what we do to survive.”

There’s a finality to his tone that cuts off Kell’s words in his throat.

Away in the distance, still surrounded by wild dancers and brawlers, a pale figure turns and beckons with a single finger - too far away for Kell to make out whether it’s Athos or Astrid. Holland’s jaw tightens.

And then he follows, as surely as though led by an invisible leash. The horses flick their ears at his back, leads trailing and manes fluttering in the wind, before they lower their heads again.

Kell stands staring after him, nails digging into his palms.

Four years the Danes have sat their thrones. Four bodies they’ve buried beneath the earth, when those bodies could have gone on living.

No. What was it that Holland had said?

_The last king made sacrifices too._

Holland had loved that last king. Kell had only been fourteen then, but that much he knows. From the two different ways he’s said _my king_ today, Holland loves him still. Vortalis had been king, and he had been loved, and he had buried his own dismembered corpses. Like every dead ruler before him, he had sacrificed.

King or queen for only as long as they can keep the food coming. King or queen that rule not through vellum and ink, as Maxim and Emira do, but through the steel of a bloody knife, a bloody scythe, a plow. King or queen – king _and_ queen by blood, yes, but by blood in a way the Mareshes can never know.

No Red monarch has ever plowed. No Red monarch has ever cut their hand and let their blood drip into the soil of their world.

Kell’s world had chosen its own victim for the sacrifice long ago.

Kell stands alone in that bloody field, shivering, and his trembling has nothing to do with the knifing wind.

**Author's Note:**

> The lines from muffinworry are, "They look at each other, then at him. 'Don’t you have religion in your London?' Athos asks seriously."


End file.
